Background and career
Michael Benjamin Bay (born February 17, 1965) is an American film director and producer. He is best known for making big-budget high-concept action films with fast cutting, stylistic cinematography and visuals, and extensive use of special effects, including frequent depictions of explosions. The films he has directed include Bad Boys (1995) and its sequel Bad Boys II (2003), The Rock (1996), Armageddon (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001), the first five films in the Transformers film series, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016) and Ambulance (2022). Armageddon and Pearl Harbor each received four Academy Award nominations, the latter winning for Best Sound Editing. His films have grossed over US$6.6 billion worldwide, making him the sixth-most commercially successful director in history. Bay studied English and film at Wesleyan University, graduating in 1986, and did graduate work at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He began his career at Propaganda Films directing commercials and music videos, winning a Clio Award for a 1992 Red Cross spot and a Grand Prix Clio for the 1993 "Aaron Burr" Got Milk? commercial. He was later hired by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson to direct Bad Boys, the first of five collaborations with Bruckheimer. Bay is co-founder of the production house the Institute, through which he has directed commercials for brands including Victoria's Secret, Lexus and Nike. He co-owns Platinum Dunes, a production house which has remade horror films. From 2006 to 2012, Bay was a co-owner of the visual effects company Digital Domain. Despite commercial success, Bay's work is critically divisive, and his name has been used pejoratively in art-house circles. Reviewers have often faulted Bay's preference for action and spectacle over story and character, his broad humor, extensive product placement, and his use of racial stereotypes for comic effect. Six of his films have been nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture and Worst Director, with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) winning the latter. He has also been criticized for objectifying women in his films, and Megan Fox and Kate Beckinsale have publicly described being mistreated by him during production. Other commentators, including the film historian Jeanine Basinger and Variety's Scott Foundas, have praised the scale and fluency of his filmmaking.
Bay was born in Los Angeles. He was raised by his adoptive parents Harriet, a bookstore owner and child psychiatrist, and Jim, a Certified Public Accountant. He was raised Jewish. His grandfather was from Russia. His cousin, Susan Bay, is the widow of Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy (whom he eventually cast as the voice actor for Sentinel Prime in Transformers: Dark of the Moon). He attended the exclusive Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California. Bay often traces his interest in action films back to an incident during his childhood. As a boy, he attached some firecrackers to a toy train and filmed the ensuing fiery disaster with his mother's 8 millimeter camera. The fire department was called and he was grounded. Bay got his start in the film industry interning with George Lucas when he was 15, filing the storyboards for Raiders of the Lost Ark, which Bay believed was going to be terrible. His opinion changed after seeing it in the theater and he was so impressed by the experience that he decided to become a film director. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1986, majoring in both English and film. He was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity and a favorite student of film historian Jeanine Basinger. For his graduate work, he attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he also studied film. His classmates included future Hollywood film directors Tarsem Singh and Zack Snyder. Singh also appeared in one of Bay's student films as a camel salesman.
Bay began working at Propaganda Films, directing commercials and music videos, two weeks after finishing his postgraduate degree. His 90-second World War II–inspired Coca-Cola advertisement was picked up by Capitol Records. His first national commercial was for the Red Cross, which won a Clio Award in 1992. He directed Goodby, Silverstein & Partners' "Aaron Burr" commercial as part of the "Got Milk?" ad campaign for the California Milk Processors Board in 1993, which also won a Grand Prix Clio Award for Commercial of the Year. Bay's success in music videos gained the attention of producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, who selected him to direct his first feature-length film, Bad Boys. It was shot in Miami in 1994 and starred Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. The action film was a breakout role for Smith, who was making a transition from television at the time. Shooting in Miami was a good experience for Bay, who would later own a home in the city and spend a great deal of time there. The film was completed for $19 million and grossed a remarkable $141 million in the summer of 1995. Bay's success led to a strong partnership and friendship with Jerry Bruckheimer. His follow-up film, The Rock (1996), an action movie set on Alcatraz Island and in the San Francisco Bay area, starred Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson, who died five months before its release. The film is dedicated to him. Connery and Cage won "Best On-Screen Duo" at the MTV Movie Awards in 1997, and the film was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Achievement in Sound category for the work of Greg P. Russell, Kevin O'Connell and Keith A. Wester. After the success of The Rock, Bay established his production company Bay Films, with a two-picture deal with Disney.
In 1998, Bay again collaborated with Jerry Bruckheimer, this time as a co-producer, as well as directing the action-adventure film Armageddon. The film, about a group of tough oil drillers who are sent by NASA to deflect an asteroid from a collision course with Earth, starred Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler. It was nominated for four Oscars at the 71st Academy Awards, including Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing and Best Original Song. It earned $9.6 million on its opening day and $36.5 million through the first weekend. Its budget of $140 million was one of the highest of the summer of 1998. It went on to gross over $553 million worldwide, the highest-grossing film of that year. In 2001, Bay directed Pearl Harbor, starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale and Cuba Gooding, Jr. It was released on Memorial Day weekend in 2001, again produced by Bay with Jerry Bruckheimer. It received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing and Best Song. Kevin O'Connell received another nomination for Best Sound, but did not win. Pearl Harbor won in the category for Sound Editing, making it Bay's first (and, to date, only) film to win an Oscar. Bay also directed the music video for the nominated track "There You'll Be" by vocal artist Faith Hill. Bay reteamed with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence for Bad Boys II, a sequel that was Bay's fifth collaboration with Jerry Bruckheimer. It grossed $138 million domestically, enough to cover the production budget, and $273 million worldwide, almost twice as much as the first movie. In 2005, Bay directed The Island, a science fiction film starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. It was the first film Bay made without Jerry Bruckheimer as a producer. It cost $126 million to produce and earned $36 million domestically and $127 million overseas, for a total of $163 million. Bay said that he was not comfortable with the domestic marketing campaign, as it confused the audience about the film's true subject.
In 2007, he teamed up with executive producer Steven Spielberg to direct Transformers, a live action film based on the Transformers franchise. Released in July 2007, by November of that year it had made over $709 million worldwide. Bay returned as director and executive producer for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which was released on June 24, 2009 and grossed over $832 million worldwide. Although it received mostly negative reviews by critics, including aggressively critical reviews by American film critics such as Roger Ebert, Michael Phillips and David Denby (who referred to Bay as "stunningly, almost viciously, untalented"), the film was well received by its intended audience and one of the highest-grossing of 2009. In 2010, it earned seven Golden Raspberry Award nominations, and won three: Worst Picture, Worst Director and Worst Screenplay. It was also one of the best-selling DVD and Blu-ray Discs of 2009, second only to Twilight in DVD format, and the #1 of all time in Blu-ray format until it was surpassed by Blu-ray sales of James Cameron's Avatar in April 2010. Bay directed Transformers: Dark of the Moon, released on June 29, 2011, which grossed $1.123 billion globally. His next film was a comparatively small one he had been developing for years, called Pain & Gain. The true crime story, based on events described in a Miami New Times article by Pete Collins, concerns a group of bumbling bodybuilders working together to commit a robbery. It starred Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shalhoub and Ed Harris.
Bay produced DreamWorks' I Am Number Four, based on a series of novels by Pittacus Lore published by HarperCollins Children's Books. D. J. Caruso (Eagle Eye, Disturbia) directed. A fourth Bay-directed Transformers movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction, was released in June 2014. Starring Mark Wahlberg, it earned $1.1 billion at the global box office. On January 12, 2016, Paramount Pictures released 13 Hours, which Bay produced and directed, based on the 2012 Benghazi attack. While the lowest-grossing film of Bay's career at the box office, it went on to massive DVD sales on its digital release in May 2016, earning over $40 million in home video revenue.
